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Kim Il-sung, in his 1946 decree “On Transporting Intellectuals from South Korea,” explained his desire to bring five hundred thousand people to the North to compensate for the mass exodus in the years leading up to the war. He envisioned an ambitious abduction project that would serve his regime while destabilizing other countries. It began with the South. An estimated eighty-four thousand South Koreans were kidnapped during the Korean War. For the first two decades after the 1953 armistice, the abductees were primarily South Korean fishermen whose boats had drifted too far up the coast. . . .

Kim Jong-il, who would go on to take over his father’s position, expanded the program outside the Koreas. He diversified and expanded intelligence operations, abducting native teachers to train North Korean spies to navigate the languages and cultures of Malaysia, Thailand, Romania, Lebanon, France, and Holland. Japanese nationals were especially sought after, because their identities could be used to create fake passports. . . .

People began to disappear from Japan in 1977. A security guard vacationing at a seaside resort two hundred miles northwest of Tokyo vanished in mid-September. A thirteen-year-old girl named Megumi Yokota, walking home from badminton practice in the port city of Niigata, was last seen eight hundred feet from her family’s front door. Dozens more went missing from other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. A Thai woman living in Macau was grabbed on her way to a beauty salon. Four Lebanese women were brought from Beirut. A Romanian artist, having been promised an exhibition, was abducted. Some were lured onto airplanes by the prospect of jobs abroad; others were simply gagged, thrown into bags, and transported by boat to North Korea. Their families spent years searching for the missing, checking mortuaries, hiring private detectives and soothsayers. Only five of the Japanese abductees were ever seen again.

The purveyors of those lists think we’re incapable of drawing upon many of our brain cells during June, July, or August; which is too bad because Blaine Harden’s book is as compelling and consequential as any I’ve read in a long time.

I’ve been a fan of Harden’s since reading Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, a book he wrote while reporting on Africa for the Washington Post in the late 80’s (yes youngsters, there was a time when newspapers had foreign bureaus). It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in Korean history or geopolitics, give Harden a chance and he’ll reel you in with engaging details coupled with clean and concise prose.

Loyal PressingPausers know I’ve become keenly interested in North Korea. In all of my extensive reading on the peninsula, this is the first work that has left me feeling complicit in the creation and continuation of the nightmare state. That’s what’s known as a “tease”.

Stick it to everyone recommending superficial summer fare by taking Harden to the beach. Exercise your mind. Then let me know what you thought.

You know the story. A former NBA player recruits a team of retired professional basketball players to play an exhibition game in front of Kim Jong Un on his birthday. Obviously, the players haven’t spent any of their post NBA lives learning anything about life in North Korea. The whole trip, especially the players clapping adoringly while the team leader serenaded Kim Jong Un with “Happy Birthday”, was almost too surreal to process.

Understandably, the media was quick to criticize the player and his friends. But the national-centric nature of the media’s criticism warrants criticism. And as far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been any. Never mind that 1m North Koreans died during famines in the 90s, that hunger is still a daily reality for most North Koreans, or that state prison camps have doubled in size since Kim Jong Un’s ascension two years ago. Learn more here.

The media’s criticism has focused on only one thing, American missionary Kenneth Bae, whose story is tragic. Bae, who is in declining health, is being held against his will for allegedly cataloging the extent of hunger among North Koreans under the guise of Christian missionary work. Bae’s story deserves media attention, but not at the expense of tens of millions of ordinary North Koreans whose daily lives have always been a living hell.

Our passivity about the plight of ordinary North Koreans explains the myopic media coverage we’ve been subjected to. Interestingly, Bae was born in South Korea and moved to California when he was 17 or 18 years old. Overtime he not only gained citizenship, he secured the one thing that seems to make him far more important than all the North Koreans combined, a U.S. passport.

Our passivity about our media’s national-centrism is an embarrassment. The North Korean media spotlight is in actuality a sporadic lighting of dim, fast burning individual match sticks. Given that, it’s especially important that our first instinct is always to honor the humanity of everyone held captive in North Korea irrespective of their nationality.

Mr. Johnson, 45, was cited by the board for an ‘exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.’

While writing the novel, Mr. Johnson said, he read propaganda and books approved by the regime. He eventually included Kim Jong-il, the late North Korean leader, as a character in the book. ‘I came to, not feel for him, but to see a human dimension in him,’ he said. ‘He was a very cunning person, a very witty person. He had flaws like all people. The more I studied him the more I realized that he was a very human figure.

One can’t read those books and watch those films and not be alternately repulsed, saddened, horrified, angered, and ultimately, changed.

I believe most people are rational, well intentioned, and deserving of respect. From the time my daughters first started talking, I took time to explain to them my expectations, decisions, and actions. In turn, I tried to defuse conflicts by listening to them. I believe in non-violent social change. Like Gandhi, I believe that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” I believe diplomacy always holds more promise for international conflict resolution than military action.

And so why did former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson’s and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s trip to North Korea anger me so much last week? Because my North Korea self-study has challenged much of what I believe to be true about global politics. I’m not sure anything I wrote in the previous paragraph applies to North Korea. The leadership is not rational and the regime isn’t just evil in the context of contemporary world politics, but in the course of human history. I have absolutely no faith that diplomacy will bring about any meaningful change. I’m not sure of the best course of action, but I know Richardson and “Rock Star” Schmidt are making matters worse by helping delude the outside world that North Korea is changing for the better.

It’s reprehensible for Richardson to say, “the naming of a new U.S. secretary of state could also help reset dialogue”. Yeah right, North Korea is the way it is because of Hilary Clinton. That’s an embarrassingly stupid statement for someone with Richardson’s credentials to make. And when a CNN television anchor interviewed Richardson, all she was concerned about was 44 year-old Kenneth Bae, an American being held in North Korea. No concern for the 23 million ordinary North Koreans whose lives are the most hellish on the planet.

Blaine Harden and Suzanne Scholte explain the problem this way.

“In a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, no pop idol, no Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video. Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney. North Koreans have no one like that.”

In part, that’s why I resolve to use this humble blog from time to time to inform others about North Korea, to agitate on behalf of impoverished and imprisoned North Koreans, and to criticize naive, misguided public figures.

Despite the preponderance of superficial on-line communication in these most fast paced of days, my reading over the last fourteen months convinces me that long form non-fiction and fiction writing may be as healthy as at any time in the recent past. That’s my way of saying, damn I’ve read a lot of amazing books recently.

None more so than Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel. I don’t write well enough to adequately credit Johnson for one of the more creative, imaginative, and haunting novels I’ve read in a long, long time. I’m sure you’ve seen a movie or two that left you completely drained as a result of the film’s suspenseful arc, quality of acting, and artistic beauty more generally. Immobilized, you just kind of stared blankly as the credits rolled. That’s how I felt upon finishing The Orphan Master’s Son. Unable to get off the bed, I wondered who is this extraordinary guy with the ordinary name, where does his imagination come from, and how and the hell did he write that? Total and complete awe.

Here are some answers from Johnson himself:

When I arrived at Pyongyang’s Sunan Airport a few years ago, my head was still spinning from a landing on a runway lined with cattle, electric fences and the fuselages of other jets whose landings hadn’t gone so well. Even though I’d spent three years writing and researching The Orphan Master’s Son, I was unprepared for what I was about to encounter in “the most glorious nation in the world.”

I’d started writing about North Korea because of a fascination with propaganda and the way it prescribes an official narrative to an entire people. In Pyongyang, that narrative begins with the founding of a glorious nation under the fatherly guidance of Kim Il Sung, is followed by years of industry and sacrifice among its citizenry, so that when Kim Jong Il comes to power, all is strength, happiness and prosperity. It didn’t matter that the story was a complete fiction–every citizen was forced to become a character whose motivations, desires and fears were dictated by this script. The labor camps were filled with those who hadn’t played their parts, who’d spoken of deprivation instead of plenitude and the purest democracy.

When I visited places like Pyongyang, Kaesong City, Panmunjom and Myohyangsan, I understood that a genuine interaction with a North Korean citizen was unlikely, since contact with foreigners was illegal. As I walked the streets, not one person would risk a glance, a smile, even a pause in their daily routine. In the Puhung Metro Station, I wondered what happened to personal desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true nature? These mysteries–of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of rewritten longings–are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced these people to conceal.

Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to military, political and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions, abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn’t make sense without writing his role as well.

I agree with “Maine Colonial” the author of the top-rated of Amazon’s 69 Orphan Master’s Son reviews who wrote, “The book can be confusing, as it jumps from one narrator to another, one time period to another, one style to another, with no explanation. But it’s so vividly written, I didn’t worry about the shifts and came to enjoy the crazy-quilt style.”

Maine Colonial also references an interview Johnson gave in which he said he sees his book as a “trauma narrative,” in which a survivor of traumatic experiences tells stories that are similarly disjointed and that “bend and mix genres as characters attempt to patch their stories back together using the stories they find around them.”

In the weeks and months immediately following 9/11, I remember reading and hearing lots of analysis that suggested our intelligence forces couldn’t thwart the attack in part because no one could visualize one of that nature and scope. If Johnson ever tires of teaching creative writing at Stanford, it would behoove our nation’s security agencies to tap his unparalleled imagination.

I’ve been subjecting my unlucky, long-suffering wife to a string of intense foreign flicks. Most recently, In a Better World, which won the Oscar for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film. One reviewer explains that “the film examines the different ways people react to injustice, and looks at how what counts as ‘revenge’, as opposed to ‘justice’, is a matter of perception.” Watch it and let me know what you think.

How do you react to injustice? What, if anything, do you do when you see an adult hit a child in public? What, if anything, do you do when you learn someone is a victim of domestic abuse? What, if anything do you when your tax dollars make it possible for drones to kill bad guys and innocent civilians anonymously from the sky?

I know what you do when an evil person, family, or cadre in Zimbabwe or North Korea hits, impoverishes, and imprisons on a national scale. Nothing. Most people cope with the atrocities of those regimes by not paying attention to them. If we don’t even know where Zimbabwe and North Korea are, who Kim Jong-un and Robert Mugabe are, or what Zimbabweans’ and North Koreans’ lives are like, it’s so much easier to just make fun of how backward the countries are.

On the other hand, if we’re better than our popular culture, and press pause long enough to learn what life is like for fellow humans who were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s impossible to watch the North Korean succession without getting sick to your stomach.

The North Korean tragedy is nearly impossible to grasp, but here’s an imperfect analogy. If your politics are anything like mine, after John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, you had a few “Oh shit, there’s a possibility of an ill-informed, right wing dilettante becoming president” moments. Forget President Sarah Palin. Instead imagine if the vote was canceled and Jenna Bush was appointed President. Jenna, not Barbara because she revealed a greater capacity for cruelty. One of Jong-un’s alleged childhood pastimes was torturing small animals.

I miss Christopher Hitchens’ writing. This incredibly vacuous New Yorker essay on North Korea’s Kim Jong-il’s funeral ceremony/performance begs a question—who will fill his shoes? Without Hitchens’ passionate, populist voice the Kim Jong-un succession has even more of a feel of inevitability.

I get it, the immediacy of the evil in North Korea pales in comparison to the violence in our own neighborhoods and communities, but the scale of human suffering deserves more of our attention. We can and should be committed to a more peaceful and just 2012 both in our own communities and on the Korean Peninsula.